A people's tragedy

But this too was by and large the outcome of looking at the peasants not for what they were but for the proof of some abstract theory, in this case the Marxist one. The dominant peasants within the village were, on the whole, the oldest patriarchs, who were often but not necessarily the heads of the richest households too. The late nineteenth-century Russian village still retained many of the features of what anthropologists would call a ‘traditional society’. Although capitalism was certainly developing in Russia as a whole, apart from in a few specific regions it had yet to penetrate the village, where indeed the purpose of the commune was to limit its effects. The domination of the peasant patriarchs was not based on capitalist exploitation but on the fact that, by and large, this was still an oral culture, where the customs of the past, passed down through the generations, served as a model for the collective actions of the village in the present and the future: ‘Our grandfathers did it this way, and so shall we.’ In this sort of culture the old men were invariably deemed to be the most important people in the village — they had the most experience of farming and knew the most about the land — and their opinion was usually decisive. Old women, too, were respected for their expertise in handicrafts, medicine and magic. This was by and large a conservative culture. True, as the social anthropologist Jack Goody’s many works have shown, there are ways in which an oral culture may produce an informal dynamism: since no one knew for sure what their grandfathers did, the peasant elders could remake tradition in every generation to fit in with their changing needs. But on the whole the peasant patriarchs had an inbred mistrust of any ideas from the world outside their own experience. They aimed to preserve the village traditions and to defend them against progress. The ‘old way of life’ was always deemed to be better than the new. There was, they believed, a peasant utopia in the distant past, long before the gentry and the state had imposed their domination on the village.

Of course, it was true that there were broader forces leading to the decline of this patriarchal world. The money economy was slowly penetrating into remote rural areas. Urban manufactures were replacing the old peasant handicrafts. New technologies were becoming available to the enterprising peasant. Railways, roads, postal services and telegraphs were opening up the village to the outside world. Hospitals and schools, reading clubs and libraries, local government and political parties, were all moving closer to the peasantry. The growth of rural schooling, in particular, was giving rise to a new generation of ‘conscious’ peasant men and women — young and literate, thrifty and sober, self-improving and individualistic — who sought to overturn the old village world.